The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts.

There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.